what do you think now? pretty huh? like cat hair tumbleweeds. my new motto is – “you may look at the ball of fur, but please don’t twine it into yarn.”
oh and this was a good one. this little number was right under the dining room table. imagine seeing that when you sit down to dinner with company. awesome!
poor pumpkin. she’s such a sweet, loveable cat, but i should have known that she was going to be a handful when we adopted her from our local vet almost ten years ago. this was our first experiencing adopting a kitten (up to that point, any cat i had owned was either from a grocery store parking lot or a stray that my bleeding heart couldn’t turn away). as it turned out, pumpkin was part of a litter that was found dumped behind an abandoned building along with their poor, little emaciated momma.
red flag #1 – pumpkin and her siblings had been weened at a month old and looked worse for the wear. on top of that she had a very sensitive digestive system.
red flag #2 – we couldn’t take her home right away because she had ringworm. oh the vet gave us the option of giving her the ringworm treatments at home, but i thought that might be a task better left to trained professionals.
red flag #3 – after two days at home, pumpkin developed a urinary infection which required large doses of antibiotics. said antibiotics caused her – let’s just say – severe bowel issues which required that i wash her butt every night in order to remove the dried poo from around her butthole.
after a few days of this mortifying process, i called our vet in tears. he graciously offered to stay late so i could bring her in. the only problem was that my spouse was out of town and i had to get the babysitter home. so i loaded up the new suburban with my kid, the sitter, and pumpkin. couldn’t get any takers to hold our beloved kitten (what with her poo crusted butt and all) so i held her on my lap wrapped up in a bath towel. the babysitter’s house was a 10 minute drive and pumpkin cried the whole way. not the tiny “mewing” that kittens do – no it was the pathetic howl of cat being held down against its will. once we got the sitter dropped off the fun didn’t stop there. no – i had to vote! it was the 2000 election day and the polls were closing in 30 minutes. i pulled into the polling place and the line was out the door. great. then came the dilemma of what to do with pumpkin while i went in to vote. do i risk her having an accident in my spouses new suburban? um, no. so there i was in the polling line, strung out working mom with tiny, bath towel wrapped kitten in my arms and child in tow. have you ever tried connecting the arrows on a voting form with an unhappy, digestively distressed cat in one hand? i wouldn’t recommend it. but i managed to pull it off and finally made it to vet’s office. by the time i got there all three of us were crying. i can only imagine what he thought when we pulled in.
needless to say pumpkin made it through her first traumatizing few weeks. she’s still a little off and has some unsightly issues now and then. but we try not to judge her too harshly – she had a rough start.
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